Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics Review

By Daniel Acaba

Many people were eagerly awaiting the arrival of Dungeons and Dragons:
Tactics to store shelves. In this corner, you had the D&D fans salivating at the
prospect of a solid turn based game that would give a more true experience of
the game that mirrored the pen and paper version. In the other corner you will
find the turn based strategy enthusiasts, salivating at a game that promised
strong character customization and plenty of options that would allow them to
approach fights as they chose to. Unfortunately both groups were fated to be
disappointed by the end result.

Essentially what you are playing when you put this game in your unsuspecting
PlayStation Portable is the world's most boring D&D campaign. The story is
uninspired, consisting of a threat to a kingdom that could be the end of all you
hold dear and it plays out in a fairly standard, by the numbers series of
adventures. Your main hero will lead a party of up to eleven other misfits to
save his kingdom although you can only bring six at a time into combat with you
(including your hero). This leaves you with five guys on the sidelines should
you get the bug to change up your party.

When you put the game in the first thing you will notice is the ungodly load
times, get used to these. The initial load that brings you to the start menu can
take up to a full minute at times and some of the other load times are just as
bad. This is a problem that never goes away. From here you are given the option
to start a new campaign with a party of pre-generated characters or to make a
new team all of your own design. This is probably the strongest part of the
game, and at the same time a major failing. Let's talk about the good side of it
first.

Put literally, you can make just about anything you could want to play in a
basic Dungeons and Dragons game, from a noble Elven ranger to a surly half-Orc
barbarian. However, as an added bonus they even let you use two of the psychic
classes: the Psychic Warrior, a fighter type character who uses psychic
abilities to back up his combat skills, and the Psion, essentially a mage type
character using psychic abilities instead of actual magic. These two classes add
a unique spin to the game not found in other current D&D games, even the
memorable Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series.

A major problem is the lack of clear documentation for this game. There is no
way for you to plan out what sort of character you want to play ahead of time.
When making a character in pen and paper D&D you have the books telling you what
stats you need to take certain skills. There is no such information in this
game. So when making a character if you do not give him specific attributes you
may never know that if he had one more point of dexterity he could take a skill
to let him dodge attacks better. Without this it is very hard to create the
character you want, especially since some skills were wholly removed from the
game and you cannot just consult a D&D book for help.